How A Design Business Came To Be
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I Had A Design Business Revelation
We made it through our first official launch of THE MMDH Furnishing Method last week. What an incredible feat it was to work our way through our beta round in the spring, and then officially launch our first professional design guidance course for homeowners last week!
The sole goal of this course and the design platform we are building is to make an incredibly designed and personality-filled home approachable to every design-ready homeowner.
We are determined to help you bring your home design goals to life. 🙌 Before we dive further into the present, let’s take it back to how a design business came to be.
MY DAYDREAM
Melissa Mahoney Design House (MMDH) started as a daydream while I was designing office spaces globally, for forward-thinking clients that really trusted my team’s every move. The firm I worked for right out of design school backed every designer on nearly every design decision we ever made, to the point that I was running my own national accounts within a few years of working there. It was a real scene. Me teary eyed, sitting in annual reviews, asking why on earth they were throwing me in head first to every project 😭
The Early Days
When I started in the corporate interiors world, I didn’t want anyone on the other end of a conference call to hear me breathe. I was in total fear that my name would be mentioned and I’d have to speak. This was before video calls were a thing, thankfully (we were still faxing submittals)! 😅
Thirteen years later, I had traveled to the farthest ends of the earth and back for projects, managed teams of a dozen people, and helped design around a million square feet of space… I had never added it all up, but wow, it was A LOT!
My Initial Pivot
I decided to bail. It was time to leave the commercial interiors side of this industry to follow that daydream I mentioned earlier. I didn’t have a name for the daydream business, or a real plan. I just had a 2-year-old and 4-year-old at home who needed to see more of me, and a pretty major drive to help others make their houses into more legit homes.
My Current Pivot
Here we are, 5+ years into my daydream career, and it turns out I can do hard things. As I pivot MMDH from 100% one-on-one referral business to a digital community of homeowners who are mostly finding us online, I’ve got a lot to prove!
It is not every day that you see an experienced interior designer ready and willing to help you ramp up your surroundings by sharing their decades of in-field knowledge to your fingertips!
Pro Tip: Learn as many lessons as possible from someone who has already learned them the hard way.
Our Digital Design Platform for Homeowners
Thanks to our growing community of design-enthusiasts with incredible feedback, we know you are so ready for this: a go-to source for all of your home design questions; a push to reach beyond your design-eye comfort zone; motivation to keep the ball rolling with all of your home projects; professional guidance to get it all right the first time around.
Our Home Furnishing Course
As of this month, we have officially launched our first “evergreen” course for design-enthusiast homeowners. The MMDH Furnishing Method is our 6-module digital course to help you fully furnish one thoughtfully designed room in your home at a time. This course is available at any time, in any place, to guide you through your next (or maybe current 😉) home furnishing project.
Our Furnishing Rules of Thumb
Beyond our course, we have also released a downloadable MMDH Furnishing Rules of Thumb with all of my top-of-mind furnishing tips for your home. This series of documents is sorted by room and item, in order to give you a quick cheat sheet before purchasing or placing one more item in your home.
We have included everything in this document from the ideal coffee table height vs. sofa seat height; to the minimum end table size to house a lamp; to styling tricks of the trade and more! This document is the perfect solo purchase or add-on to The MMDH Furnishing Method course, and works for any scale furnishing project at any time.
We cannot wait for you to take advantage and keep your eyes peeled for more to come!
It’s All in The Design Process
It took me almost two decades to get to the point of lifting my head up from work and realizing I could be offering my knowledge to a lot more homeowners than the few one-on-one clients I am able to take on at a time. I am thrilled you are here for it!
As we ramp up the digital side of MMDH, I am more and more excited about the possibilities of home. I am about to jump into our student group this week to post my own upcoming project, and I can’t wait to follow my step-by-step process along side of our crew. We would love for you to join in the goodness at any time!
This pivot is a design business revelation I could not be more excited about. While there are even more major goals in MMDH’s future for you to get excited about, I am thrilled to get to know you and your home projects as we continue to build this design platform for design-enthusiast homeowners together.
xo,
SHOP THE MMDH LOOK
